Mobile phones and surveillance

Drew Hemment. Published in Greenpepper 2003

Mobile phones are ubiquitous and mundane, both in the West and increasingly in the global South, and the proliferation of mobile phones and masts creates an infrastructure and a flood of microwave radiation that is only partially tapped by the routing of calls and messaging. Unlike the kind of packet-based delivery system of the internet the mobile phone delivery system is directional, and so its greatest potential is locative. This locative potential suggests new ways of relating to place and to each other, and with other locative media such as GPS makes possible new forms of cultural and artistic expression in the same way that the invention of the chronometer as an on-board ship location device in the eighteenth century changed the view of the Earth and gave rise to new forms of representation. But equally just as the navigation of the oceans led to a new form of global power in the shape of the British Empire, so this current generation of positioning technologies bring with them new forms of control, an unprecedented capacity to pinpoint and to connect the individual to ever proliferating databases that are the new repositories of power.

The mobile phone is not only a communication device but also a tracking device. Location data from mobile phones is routinely used in court cases in the UK and by the intelligence services, and was used by the Russian security services in the assassination of Chechnya’s rebel leader Dudayev (reportedly with NSA support). This location data is routinely generated so that calls can be routed, data which is recorded by the Operators. This is cell based and simply records the closest mast to the handset against time. Triangulation data is far more precise, calculating location to within 25m from the time delay in signals received by different masts. Even pay-as-you-go phones, for which details of owners are not recorded, offer no respite, as mobiles can be easily hacked to obtain their unique EMEI number, transforming the mobile into a electronic tagging device, worn not on the ankle but innocently in the pocket with no need for a court order. And as mobiles and PDAs merge it will not be just location and phone logs that can be accessed, but diaries, contacts, et al. Yet more forms of surveillance are in development that exploit the flood of microwave radiation created by the global coverage of GSM. The CelldarTM system, developed by a UK subsidiary of Seimens for anti-terrorism defence, security and road traffic management, offers the capability to see in real-time through walls or view moving objects hundreds of miles away by measuring deviations in the radiation field to calculate the position, speed, direction, size and potentially shape and composition of targeted objects.

Surveillance is no longer the exceptional fate of the few, a state sanction requiring an extensive network of agents, or requiring the covert installation of costly and sophisticated, specialist instruments. In recent years there has been an exponential rise in new forms of surveillance, and of the ways in which information about individuals may be recorded, stored and accessed. The complexity of different systems, databases and protocols mean that no individual or institution has a complete overview or a position of control, and it is now a mundane aspect of everyday existence, operating through every credit card transaction and border crossing, while store cards and RFID tags (which enable the use of products once they leave the shop to be monitored) introduce anonymous but pervasive surveillance as a means of producing better products and better consumers. Mobile phones look set to do for surveillance what TV did for advertising in the last century. Mobile telephony provides a ready made infrastructure for new forms of surveillance, and this is being enthusiastically embraced on a State level but also in the form of consumer products, creating a whole new ecology of observation and control. It is a wearable technology that places the Panoptic eye in your pocket and the body within the circuits of dataveillance. Deleuze has argued that the disciplinary society of factories and prisons has given way to a control society, where mechanisms of domination are less evident but far more pervasive and operate through codes and passwords. The mobile phone in many ways encapsulates the new relationship of power better than any other technology, in a similar way to the Panopticon did for the last. Bentham’s famous design for the Panopticon, an ideal prison in which the inmates can be observed at all times without knowing when the observation takes place, so that they internalise the gaze and ultimately police themselves, envisaged tin listening tubes connecting the control tower to each cell, in an amazing forward to the mobile phone. What is new in the complex of control and communication of mobile telephony is not just its mobility, but the fact that it is not imposed but embraced for both business and pleasure, a system of power spread through marketing and accessed through subscription services.

New surveillance systems are being developed through consumer platforms, but at the same time applications previously used for surveillance are being marketed as consumer products. The locative potential of mobile phones is being unleashed in the cultural domain by the mobile phone Operators in the form of location based services, transforming the handset into a personalised positioning device. A service being introduced in Finland will allow parents to access an online map that pinpoints their childrens’ exact location 24-7, without consent if they are under 15 years old. Finland is introducing new legislation for this and expects the rest of the EU to follow. Other services enable friends to be found, that elusive gay bar to be located, or gamezones to spill out into the city streets. Surveillance is being dispersed but also transformed, a technical capacity to locate becoming a tool to help us consume better and a new form of entertainment. The marketing plan of the Operators fits neatly within a new theoretical paradigm that has emerged following the success of Big Brother and reality TV. Whereas Orwell’s 1984 expressed and embodied a fear of the future as a place in which all people and all things would be observed at all times, we now live in a present, it is claimed, characterised by “scopophilia”, a mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and an ontological need to be observed. This perspective rests heavily on the lens of TV and the vagaries of instant stardom. And Big Brother is based on the assumption that normal rules do not apply, separated from an outside world by barbed wire and guards, interaction mediated by an omnipresent disembodied voice. Location services on the other hand operate within the mundane world of consumer purchases and nights on the town, introducing a kind of surveillance that is not spectacular but everyday.

While this is driven by the technology push and marketing plans of the Operators, an emerging artform is coalescing around programmers, artists and theorists who are exploring how locative media can be appropriated for user-led mapping and collaborative cartography. Since 1992 Masaki Fujihata’s Field Works project has brought together location data captured by GPS and moving image captured by video to reconstruct collective memories, while artists such as Esther Polak, Marc Tutors and other members of the Locative Media Lab are opening an expansive domain of ‘geo hacking’ in which augmented reality coincides with social and geographical space in many interesting ways. The annotation of physical space can enable people to map and create their own environments, to share local histories and knowledge, or inscribe their artistic visions upon the canvas of geographical space. Often constrained by the poor usability of handheld devices, locative media has not yet reached the point at which the technology disappears. But the simple juxtaposition of location and augmented space suggests radical new ways of relating to place and to each other, enabling new artforms to emerge out of the spaces of the everyday.

Locative media suggests how positioning and surveillance mechanisms can be appropriated, used not for pinning down but for opening up. Considered as a form of grass roots activism it shows how positioning technologies can be enabling, perhaps the only option left when surveillance becomes entertainment and the discourse of Privacy breaks down. In mobile telephony there is a convergence of communication and control, creating a continuum running through surveillance, location based services and locative media arts. Location Services is a project that occupies this conflictual space. It does not seek to draw back the curtain of privacy, but rather to open it all the way, to expose the hidden forces behind the technology push, and to put the tools in the hands of all. It seeks to add its voice to a chorus struggling to be heard over the murmur of ringtones, and to open up yet further this contested space, working within the ambiguous territory between mobility and immobility, and between pleasure and control, by appropriating surveillance mechanisms or developing countermeasures that create distortions or moments of uncertainty at their limits, and dispersing interventions and applications out of the galleries and off the screen.